It is easy to understand how outsourcing your healthcare practice’s provider credentialing and enrollment responsibilities to a third-party service provider can save you a lot of time and hassle. Many people, though, assume that the various benefits that outsourcing provider credentialing and enrollment provides come at the cost of increased expenses. In this article, we’ll explore whether or not this assumption is actually true in order to help you determine if working with a third-party credentialing and enrollment service is a cost-effective solution for your practice.
Any way you go about it, credentialing a new provider and enrolling them with payers is something that requires a lot of billable hours. There are a lot of tasks involved with these processes, and many of them are quite time-consuming. Even if you are completing your provider credentialing and enrollment responsibilities in-house, you are still having to pay someone to complete all of the various paperwork and processes involved.
There’s a well-known saying in business and entrepreneurship circles that says, “there is no such thing as a free lunch”. Unfortunately, this is true of provider credentialing and enrollment as well. Anytime your healthcare practice is tasked with completing a time-intensive process, there are going to be expenses involved. Completing that process in the most efficient way possible, therefore, is ultimately the best way to reduce how much it costs.
How outsourcing Provider Credentialing and Enrollment can actually reduce administrative costs
Processes such as those involved with provider credentialing and enrollment become much more costly when they are completed in a way that is inefficient and prone to errors. When you look at it this way, it’s easy to see how paying in-house employees to complete a process that takes them 100 hours, for example, is actually much more expensive than outsourcing the process to an experienced service provider who is able to complete it in half the time.
When you choose to work with an experienced provider credentialing and enrollment service provider who knows what it takes to complete these processes in the most efficient way possible, you end up paying for far fewer billable hours than you are likely to pay if you choose to complete your provider credentialing and enrollment responsibilities in-house. At Bikham Healthcare, provider credentialing and enrollment is our core competency. Thanks to decades of experience, we are able to complete the various tasks involved with credentialing and enrolling a new provider in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. This allows us to pass our savings on to the healthcare practices that hire us – which is something that we are more than happy to do in order to provide healthcare practices with one more great reason to choose Bikham Healthcare for all of their provider credentialing and enrollment needs.
If you still need more proof that outsourcing provider credentialing and enrollment is something that can actually reduce your practice’s administrative costs over the long run, consider this 2012 Harvard study which concluded that healthcare practices are able to save up to $29,000 per physician per year by streamlining administrative activities such as those involved with credentialing and enrolling new providers.
Avoiding costly delays
In addition to ensuring that your provider credentialing and enrollment processes are completed in the most efficient manner possible, working with an experienced credentialing and enrollment service can also help you avoid common mistakes that could end up proving very costly. It would be an understatement to say that insurance payers are quite particular when it comes to the information that is submitted when you enroll a new provider. Even a mistake as simple as a misspelled name or an incomplete address can cause your application to be rejected and force you to start the entire process all over again. Not only does this force you to pay for even more hours of administrative labor, but it may also lead to a scenario where one or more physicians at your practice are unable to bill their patients for the services that they provide. By working with an experienced and meticulous credentialing and enrollment service provider such as Bikham Healthcare, though, you can ensure that you don’t encounter any mistakes that could create additional billable hours and costly delays.
Time is money
In business, time and money are largely interchangeable constructs. When you choose to outsource your practice’s provider credentialing and enrollment responsibilities, you free up yourself and your administrative staff to focus on other tasks that will grow your practice and improve its bottom line. The amount of money that freeing up space in your schedule brings into your practice may not be easy to quantify, but that doesn’t make it any less impactful. When you work with a third-party provider credentialing and enrollment service, all of the time-consuming tasks associated with credentialing and enrolling a new provider are completely taken off of your hands. How much value you are able to draw from this extra time that outsourcing provider credentialing and enrollment affords is ultimately up to you and your administrative staff.
Let Bikham Healthcare reduce your administrative costs through expert Credentialing and Enrollment Services
Benefits such as reducing administrative burden, eliminating the potential for costly errors, and speeding up the time it takes to receive payer approval make outsourcing provider credentialing and enrollment an alluring option for many healthcare providers. Best of all, the upfront costs of paying for these services are not nearly as much of a drawback as they might seem. By ensuring that your provider credentialing and enrollment process is completed in the most efficient and error-free way possible while also freeing you and your staff to focus on other areas of growing your practice’s revenue, working with a provider credentialing and enrollment service provider is something that can actually improve your practice’s bottom line.
At Bikham Healthcare, our experienced staff of provider credentialing and enrollment professionals are experts at helping healthcare practices save both time and money through industry-leading credentialing and enrollment services. To learn more about working with Bikham Healthcare for your provider credentialing and enrollment needs, be sure to contact us today.
